


i think i've seen this movie

by kat777



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, High School, Post-it Notes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 14:00:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4748969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kat777/pseuds/kat777
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Oh my god, you're in a rom-com."</p>
<p>“I’m not in a rom-com, Sam.”</p>
<p>“No, Jon, listen. <em>Listen</em>. You’ve been exchanging love notes—”</p>
<p>“Convoluted plots to take over NASA and then have Joffrey Lannister launched into a black hole are considered love notes?”</p>
<p>“—with a secret admirer—”</p>
<p>“She’s not a secret admirer. No one’s doing any admiring.”</p>
<p>“—who’s probably going to turn out to be the girl you’ve been crushing on since the beginning of time—”</p>
<p>“Sam, I swear to god.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	i think i've seen this movie

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this prompt: _We write notes to each other on the desk we share at different times and I never knew who I was talking to until I saw you stay behind after class to write on it and holy shit yoU’RE HOT._ from this tumblr post: http://stardust-sketcher.tumblr.com/post/118754184506/otp-au-ideas
> 
> I'm not sure how this happened? I don't even go here, and I'd just like to say that the Jon/Sansa corner of the fandom has ruined my life, especially the fic writers. 
> 
> Obviously, I'm not GRRM or D&D, I don't own the book series or the TV show. 
> 
> EDIT: Thanks to Ipira_Black for pointing out that the stickies had disappeared! The URLs for the different post-its were all deleted for whatever reason, hence why the images vanished. I've recreated the stickies using Paint (which was... so... much... fun, let me tell you) but I'm not sure how to insert them because they don't have URLs, and regardless, I think it's better to just use actual text to guarantee that the reader will be able to see it. So now I'm using bold & italicized font and trying to space it to look like it's a note Jon is reading. 
> 
> Anyways... Thank you so so much to everyone that's read this chapter, and to those who have commented/left kudos/bookmarked it/subscribed. I am so sorry that I haven't updated at all, I haven't forgotten about this story and I do intend to finish it, I'm just...stuck, for various reasons.

Jon knew his semester was going to suck the moment he looked at his timetable.

“This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” he said to no one in particular.

Sam slipped his own perfectly satisfactory schedule into his bag and asked, “Is it really that bad?”

It wasn’t, but Jon had been too tired from work to bother with dinner last night and his breakfast had been a banana scarfed down on the way to school, so he allowed himself the luxury of being at least a little overdramatic. “The morning is.”

“Let me look at that,” Val said, snatching the paper from him. She glanced over it quickly before scoffing, “Oh please, Snow. I have second and third period with you but you don’t see me complaining.”

He scowled at her and tugged his timetable out of her grip. “Of course not, you’re not the one who’s going to have to skip showering after PE in order to get to your next class on time.”

“Spend less time fussing over your hair,” was her immediate suggestion.

“Oh please,” he tried to mimic the disdain in her voice when she’d said the words. “You know Lannister always lets the girls go and get changed early and makes the guys wait because he’s a spiteful—”

“So you’ve both got gym with Mr. Lannister second period?” Sam interrupted their argument.

“In the field behind the dumpsters,” Jon confirmed, to which Val added, “We’ve got history with Baratheon in 306 right after.”

Sam winced in sympathy. Room 306 was on the third floor, about as far from the field where Jon and Val would have PE as you could get, _and_ it was the coldest part of the school. Then there was Stannis Baratheon, whose voice tended to fade a few minutes into his lectures to a dull droning that could put a hyped-up-on-birthday-cake-and-ice-cream Rickon Stark to sleep.

“Well… It could be worse,” he encouraged them, even as he eyed the schedule in Jon’s hands doubtfully. “Try to get there early and pick a desk close to the heating vents. And if you can’t…”

“Prepare ourselves for freezing to death when winter comes?”

“Or dying of boredom?”

“No, bring a sweater and hope Mr. Baratheon doesn’t kill you if you fall asleep.”

.

Neither Jon nor Val were anywhere close to early, but as it turned out, Baratheon was insisting on alphabetical seating arrangements this year. For Val, that meant a desk at the front right near the heating vents. For Jon, that meant one at the back corner of the room furthest from them. When he sank down into his chair, it wobbled onto its front-left leg and made a horrifyingly loud squeaky sound that had his classmates twisting around in their seats to stare at him. As if Jon wasn’t embarrassed enough already, having shown up a sweaty mess from gym and his race to get here on time.

Luckily, the teacher chose that moment to try and establish order, and after a while the giggling and smirking at Jon’s expense died down.

“Welcome to your final year of high school. Before we go over the syllabus— You there, would you mind handing these out for me? Thank you. Before we go over the syllabus, I’d like to stress how important this year will be…”

He went on say that the next few months would determine their entire future, something Jon had already heard twice this morning and would likely hear several more times before the final bell rang. At least Mr. Baratheon genuinely seemed to care in his own way, which was more than could be said for Jaime Lannister, who’d delivered the entirety of his speech with a caustic smirk on his face. Still, by the time Val got to him Jon had tuned the teacher out and was staring absentmindedly at a smiley face someone had drawn in pencil on the corner of his desk.

“Shouldn’t have skipped your shower, Snow,” Val muttered out of the corner of her mouth, setting a syllabus down in front of him. Jon glared at the back of her head as she sauntered off, resigning himself to the inevitability of her telling all of their friends about this during lunch.

Lunch. Did he even have enough change in his pocket to buy more than a bag of chips? Probably not, and he’d been in too much of a hurry this morning to pack something. He ran a frustrated hand through his hair. Was every day for the next few months going to be like this? Tired and cold and hungry, sitting through Baratheon’s boring lectures after having run all the way here from Lannister’s torture field?

His eyes fell to the drawing on his desk again. It looked recent, and Jon found himself reaching for the eraser in his bag. And then he stopped, and sighed.

At least _someone_ was having a good day.

Besides, Val might take every available opportunity to embarrass the hell out of him, but he knew she wouldn’t let him go hungry during lunch. None of his friends would. Robb would undoubtedly drag Jon over to his house later to ‘celebrate’ the first day back at school with his family just like he did every year, and they’d all feast on the delicious meal Mr. and Mrs. Stark had prepared.

Jon would get a decent night’s sleep and eat a proper breakfast in the morning. He’d pack a lunch and shower after PE even if that meant getting to his next class a couple minutes late. He’d bring a sweater, like Sam had suggested, even though it wasn’t technically cold enough for him to need one yet.

And maybe tomorrow, he’d be in a good enough mood by third period to draw a smiley face of his own.

.

Of course, Jon wasn’t really the kind of person who doodled in his spare time even when he _was_ in a good mood, but the same definitely couldn’t be said for whoever had his desk in Room 306 prior to third period. 

Every day for the next two weeks, Jon dropped into his seat at the start of history class and noticed a new picture in place of the old one, which had presumably been erased by the artist or maybe wiped away by the janitor. It was usually something cheerful, like a happy face or flowers or a puppy, though there’d been a rain cloud once when the weather was bad. Jon would often lose focus midway through Mr. Baratheon’s lectures and zero in on the drawing instead, tracing the lines with his eyes over and over again, his mind blessedly blank.

Then one day things changed. Drastically.

Jon sat down just as the bell rang, glanced at his desk and did a double-take. There were no flowers today, or even rain clouds; there was no drawing at all. Instead, written boldly in capital letters: _I HATE JOFFREY LANNISTER!!!_ (The second word was underlined twice.)

He stared, dumbfounded. The fact that some anonymous doodler hated Joffrey Lannister wasn’t all that shocking—Jon firmly believed three quarters of the student body hated the brat, and the other quarter simply hadn’t been subjected to his presence long enough, lucky bastards. 

No, the surprising part was the contrast between the pleasant pictures that had graced the surface of this desk for the past couple of weeks and the angry words that were written on it today. Jon couldn’t say he’d spared more than a passing thought as to who the artist was and what they were like, but the few possibilities he _had_ imagined didn’t mesh with what he was seeing now.

Whoever they were, they certainly were _not_ having a good day.

And maybe it was because they’d unknowingly pulled Jon out of his funk on the first day of school, or because their silly drawings had quieted his brain for a whole half-hour almost every day since, or because he could almost _feel_ the scream of frustration they’d held back while scribbling their message onto the wooden table top—but he found himself wanting to help. At first he really wasn't sure how to do that, but eventually an idea came to him...

Jon wasn’t the kind of person who doodled on school desks.

Today he made an exception.

* * *

Halfway through eating his breakfast the next morning, it occurred to Jon that maybe sketching a stick figure (which he'd helpfully labelled J. L.) being bitten in two by a shark on his desk wasn’t the best idea he’d ever come up with. In fact, it was probably one of the worst. Some teachers might ignore that drawing, but not Stannis Baratheon, who treated every school rule like it was part of the Constitution. He reported even the smallest infractions to the principal, grinding his teeth all the while. If Principal Robert Baratheon found out, so would his ex-wife, Joffrey’s _mother_. She would blow everything out of proportion and the next thing Jon knew, he would be suspended for a month.

Faced with the prospect of Cersei Lannister’s wrath, Jon was a little… _tense_ by the time he got to school, and people noticed.

“Uh, Jon?” Arya prompted when he hesitated at the front door of the building. She ended up elbowing him out of the way and pushing the door open herself, reaching back to drag him inside with her.

Grenn, Pyp and even Sam looked at him funny when he got his locker combination wrong for the third time in a row, but they all said nothing.

“You alright, man?” Robb muttered out of the corner of his mouth during first period biology, after nearly half an hour of watching Jon twitch whenever the PA system came on.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Snow?” Jaime Lannister demanded the sixth time Jon accidentally kicked a soccer ball into one of the dumpsters. “You know what, never mind. I don’t want to know. Just get that ball out of the garbage and you can go, there’s only ten minutes left anyways and you’re not doing any good here. Six fucking times, I swear to god...”

Jon spent the full ten minutes sulking in the boy’s change room, and when he came out Val was waiting for him with her arms crossed. “If I have to suffer through history, so do you,” she said heartlessly. “Let’s go.”

He followed her to the other side of the school and up two flights of stairs without complaint. What was the point, anyway, of delaying the inevitable? But all of Jon’s worry turned out to be for nothing. Mr. Baratheon greeted both him and Val with a cool nod, and when Jon reached his desk at the back there was no sign of pencil marks on it. The janitor must have washed it all off.

He was so relieved that he didn’t notice the pink paper peeking out from underneath his desk until well into Baratheon’s lecture. As discreetly as possible, Jon peeled the sticky off and read the message penned in bright blue ink:

**_LOL! Thanks, you made  
my day! :)_ **

**_(PS Sorry I erased your_ **   
**_drawing, I was worried_ **   
**_the teacher might see!)_ **

Jon blinked.

He had to read it over several more times before he processed the fact that it was indeed intended for him, and it was likely from the same person who'd declared their hatred for Joffrey Lannister yesterday, who was likely the same person that had been doodling on his desk since the semester had started.

Then he wondered what he was supposed to  _do_ with the note they'd left for him. Throw it out, leave it, keep it…reply to it? Did the writer want him to reply? Did they _expect_ him to? He picked up his pencil, then put it back down. Replying would be weird, wouldn't it?

And yet, wasn't this whole situation weird? Trying to cheer up an anonymous stranger with a poorly drawn sketch of a shark chomping on a stick figure had been weird. The note the stranger had written him in return looked like a text message/post card hybrid, which was weird. The fact that they'd written him _anything_ in return was weird. Plus, they'd erased his drawing. Whoever they were, however weird they seemed, there was no denying that they'd saved Jon's ass from a possible suspension. (Or a lawsuit. The Lannisters could be the very definition of over-the-top when they wanted to.)

_Thanks, you made my day._

Jon's mother had said that to him a lot, before. Not those exact words, but the meaning had been the same—no, it had been so much more. When his mom had thanked him for brightening her day, what she'd meant was, _I'm so glad I had you, no matter what anyone else says._

Now she couldn't even remember his name half the time.

A stranger's appreciation couldn't hold a candle to his mother's, but nonetheless Jon picked up his pencil again and wrote on the blank side of the post-it,  _Glad to hear it_ _._

He considered leaving it at that, but instead added:

_(PS No big deal, it was only my finest_ _work...)_

_(PSS_   _Seriously though, thanks. Mr. Baratheon would've killed me.)_  

Then he put the sticky back where he'd found it, figuring that would be the end of things.

.

It wasn't. When he got to history the next day there was another note stuck to the bottom of his desk, yellow rather than pink but with the same handwriting from yesterday on it in the same blue ink.

**_I was more worried about_ **   
**_Ms. Lannister seeing, I_ **   
**_have her for 2nd period_ **   
**_English._ **

**_Now SHE would've killed  
you. _ **

**_— >_ **

That wasn't what he'd expected the message to say, not that he'd expected it to say anything in particular. The thought of Cersei Lannister hearing about Jon's drawing from her ex-husband had been scary enough; the thought of her actually seeing it was ten times worse. In fact, the mental image was so terrifying that it took him a while to notice the arrow and realize what it meant. He turned the paper over and read the back:

_**PS I said I was sorry!!** _

_**It was a true masterpiece** _   
_**and it will live on forever** _   
_**in our hearts!** _

This time, it definitely felt like they wanted a reply. Jon thought it over for a bit. There wasn't much room left so he could probably get away with just thanking the person again, though that might discourage them from writing back. Which would be a good thing, obviously. He was in his senior year of high school, not second grade, and this was real life, not a movie or a TV show. Passing notes back-and-forth with a stranger would be weird, he told himself firmly. It would be  _beyond_ weird.

And...possibly kind of fun.

Against his better judgement, Jon traded the crowded sticky for a blank one from his bag and wrote,  _OH GOD, she would've chopped off my head, put it on a spike and thrown my body to a pack of bloodthirsty lions._

Then something occurred to him, and in the little space remaining he managed to fit,  _Wait, you wrote 'I hate Joffrey Lannister' on your desk while his mother was in the room? _

He squeezed an arrow into the bottom right corner and added the rest of his response on the back:  _You must be the bravest person in this entire school._ _(PS I guess I'll forgive you, seeing as you saved me from decapitation and all...)_

He stuck the post-it underneath the desk and spent the rest of third period paying attention to his history teacher for once.

* * *

The following morning Jon barely thought about the note he'd written or the reply that might be waiting; he was far too busy dealing with the Starks. He'd figured his strange behavior yesterday would be easily forgotten by everyone except Mr. Lannister, who would no doubt make him run extra laps after warm-ups, but Arya and Robb must've had a goddamn family meeting about it.

Ned called and invited him over for dinner before he'd even brushed his teeth. Catelyn buzzed him on the intercom as he was tying his shoelaces and informed him she was giving him a ride to school. When he climbed into the middle row of the mini-van, Sansa greeted him with a warm smile and a container of chocolate-chip cookies. After thanking her profusely, he twisted around in his seat and gave a very pointed hello to the two people in the back. Robb at least had the decency to look sheepish, but Arya just shrugged at him.

Jon scowled and hoped Sansa hadn't saved either one of them a single cookie. 

Thankfully none of his other friends felt the need to make a huge fuss over absolutely nothing, so everything was mostly normal once he got to school. As he began his third lap around the field during PE—"Six times," Lannister had barked, and Jon had barely managed to bite back his retort of, "You're so predictable." _—_ Jon felt some of his irritation die down.

He was grateful for their concern. Of course he was. Even as he'd sat in biology earlier, completely ignoring Robb's attempts at starting a conversation, something in Jon had wanted to relent. He would never be able to explain how much it meant to him that the Starks treated him like family. He'd tried to find the words many times before, but no matter what he came up with it was always too much and too little at the same time, and so he said nothing at all.

That was the heart of it, really, the reason for the anger still simmering in his gut. The Starks gave him so much and even though he had nothing to give in return, they just kept giving more. As if it wasn't enough that Ned and Catelyn had helped his mother raise him. As if it wasn't enough that Robb had been there by his side since before they could walk. As if it wasn't enough that Arya accepted him for who he was without the slightest hesitation. As if it wasn't enough that Bran looked up to him, and Rickon always wanted to play with him, and Sansa trusted him even after what she'd been through. 

As if all of that wasn't enough, as if it wasn't  _everything,_ they'd taken him in when his mother was finally deemed unable to care for him. When he'd decided he wanted to try living on his own, Ned had insisted on paying at least half his rent. Jon didn't even want to imagine the argument that would erupt over college tuition fees next year. The Starks were always offering more, more, more. They were even looking after his dog for him, because his apartment didn't allow pets and he was hardly ever there to begin with.

He'd get to see Ghost tonight if he went over to the house for dinner, but he'd also probably have Ned and Catelyn telling him it was okay to be stressed from school and work, it was okay to need help, it was okay to miss his mom... 

By the time he finished his laps, he'd worked himself up to the point where his rage boiled over the instant Lannister made a sarcastic comment. Storming off without permission wasn't exactly the smartest thing to do and it certainly wasn't mature, but it was better than punching a teacher in the face, so he left. He spent the remainder of class in the boy's locker room again, slipping out as soon he heard footsteps approaching. He didn't want people asking him what his problem was. It would just make things worse. 

Val wouldn't ask, though. He reached the stairs leading up the third floor and decided to wait for her. As he sat there at the bottom of the steps, his stomach growled and he remembered the container Sansa had given him. He found a piece of folded lined paper taped to the inside of the lid, and his anger was temporarily forgotten as he unfolded it and read the message: 

_Jon,_

_I made these for you last night with Bran and Rickon's help. Well, Bran helped. Rickon kept trying to eat the dough. Speaking of Rickon, he sort of thinks you're a vampire now? You can blame my darling sister and older brother for that one. Arya went on about how you wouldn't open a door yesterday and Robb said the announcements bothered you, which I guess in a seven-year-old's mind translates to being unable to cross thresholds without invitation and being sensitive to loud noises because of heightened hearing?_

_Don't worry though, he still loves you. He told me that's why he wanted to "taste test" your cookies after they came out of the oven to make sure they didn't secretly have garlic in them._

_My_   _parents said they were inviting you over for dinner today, allegedly because Uncle Benjen promised he was going to skype us later, and so I figured you could use some chocolaty goodness to help you mentally prepare yourself. Or something. Cookies make everything better, it's like a cardinal rule._

_See you at dinner,_

_Sansa_

_(P.S. I told Ghost you were coming over, he seemed very excited!)_

If there was a single person in the county who could've resisted smiling after getting a letter like this from Sansa Stark, Jon didn't ever want to meet them. Even just seeing her handwriting made him smile, that elegant cursive penned in her favorite purple ink, a mixture of sophistication and girlishness that he'd always found fitting rather than contradictory. He doubted her teachers appreciated it, though. Maybe she exchanged brilliant purple for regular black or blue or gray in class.

"Jon?"

It was Val, staring down at him, her gaze searching. But just as Jon had predicted, she didn't ask about his outburst earlier. Instead she hauled him to his feet, bumped his shoulder with hers and stole a cookie. 

"You're a brat," he told her, putting both the container and the note from Sansa away in his bag.

She ignored him, too busy chewing. "Mmmm, this is delicious," she said once she'd swallowed. " _You_ made these?"

"Your disbelief is touching, truly."

"Well, did you?"

"No," he admitted, gesturing at the stairs to indicate they should head to class now. "Sansa did."

"Robb's sister? The junior with the red hair?"

"Yeah, that's her."

Val tapped her cookie to her lip thoughtfully. "...Is she single?"

" _Val_."

"What? These are good cookies. And have you seen Sansa in a bathing suit? Because I have, at that pool party a couple months ago, and let me tell you—"

"I _have_ seen her in a bathing suit, multiple times," Jon interrupted. "I've also seen Robb threaten to maim people who leer at his sister while she's in a bathing suit, multiple times."

"I hear your threats of violence, but what I'm _not_ hearing is, 'No, Val, she's not single,' or, 'She's straight, Val,' or, 'Val, she's not into blonds and she wouldn't give you the time of day,'" she countered, completely undeterred.

They continued their playful argument all the way to Room 306. Jon liked to think that he won, though he _had_ been forced to concede that he actually had no idea whether or not Sansa was straight. And her cookies were, in fact, delicious.

So delicious that Jon snuck one out of his bag and stuffed it in his mouth when Mr. Baratheon wasn't looking. Mmmm.

He’d just finished off his fourth cookie on the sly when he suddenly remembered his anonymous pen pal. (No, Jon had not lain awake for an hour last night coming up with that nickname, of course not.)

The sticky was green today, and there was only writing on one side of it.

**_I'm not, I was just really  
_ _frustrated that day._ **

**_So  you have a class_ **   
**_with  Mr. B in here,_ **   
**_right?  What subject?_ **

He puzzled over the first sentence for a bit before recalling what he'd written to his pen pal yesterday: _You must be the bravest person in this entire school_. The way they just automatically dismissed the idea that they could be brave was actually kind of sad, so Jon took more time to think over his reply than he otherwise would have. Eventually he decided on something and scrawled it onto the back of the post-it, making his printing as small as he could so all of his message would fit.

_History,_  his reply started. _Which isn't fun,_ _but I think it's preferable to anything with Cersei Lannister._

Below that he wrote in brackets,  _Well, it seems to me that you're pretty badass when you're frustrated, so remind me to never get on your bad side._

As he attached his note to the usual spot, he considered the current state of his life. He would be stuck in this room with Stannis Baratheon for nearly an hour every day for the next few months, but he'd gained an anonymous pen pal. Mr. and Mrs. Stark were almost definitely going to be on his case later, but he'd get to see Ghost and possibly Uncle Benjen. His mom didn't know who he was more often than not, but he still had his friends and he still had a family, no matter how much they got on his nerves sometimes.

Everything said and done, he was pretty lucky. After all, how many of his classmates could say they'd still have someone to love them even if they _were_ transformed into a creature of the night?


End file.
